A typical batting tee includes a base, and an elongated stand attached to the base, which includes a cradle or the like feature for receiving a ball, such as a baseball or a softball.
In order to practice batting, a ball is placed in the cradle for the batter to hit with a bat. Thereafter, another ball could be placed in the cradle for another hit, or the same ball could be recovered and placed in the cradle for another hit if only one ball is available, for example.
To recover the ball, a batter who is practicing alone, would have to leave the location of the tee, recover the ball, place the ball back in the cradle and then hit the ball again. The recovery process is time consuming, tiring, and, unlike batting, “boring” for the practicing batter. Thus, it has been observed that a young batter who is practicing alone, tends to cut his practice short when ball recovery after every hit is necessary.
To overcome this problem, a batting tee with an automatic return mechanism has been proposed by Huang, US 2007/0049426.
Huang discloses a batting tee that includes a base, a height adjustable post attached to the base, a swing mechanism, a return mechanism located at the top of the post, a rod axially connected to the swing mechanism, and a baseball connected to an end of the rod. The return mechanism of Huang includes a mechanical energy storage device such as a spring. When the baseball is stricken by the batter, the rod is angularly displaced, and then the baseball is returned to its standby position by the return mechanism ready for the next swing.
In the tee proposed by Huang, the rod is returned to its standby position when the mechanical energy storage device releases the mechanical energy of the batter's strike (i.e., when the spring element of the return mechanism is unloaded).
In Huang's tee, the rod merely snaps back into the standby position to unload the energy stored in the mechanical energy storage device of the return mechanism. That is, the rate of the return of the arm to its standby position is not controlled.